TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Thursday, August 2, 2012

BOOK NOTE: “Pegler: Angry Man of the Press” by Oliver Pilat

You know, I gather from some comments on this blog and a big spike in readership about a week ago
that HuffingtonPost and Reddit must have briefly featured more prominently their
old links to my comments on C-SPAN2 about Helen Rittelmeyer.I’ll just refer anyone inquiring in the
future to this entry.

Long story short:
she had a disturbingly dark philosophy and m.o.; I criticized it; it was nearly
two years ago now; she’s reportedly striving to be a bit more mature and
moderate; she moved out of the country last I knew; and – this is the part that
really benefits you, the reader – we buried the hatchet just deeply enough
before she did so for me to inherit about eight old books from her
continually-expanding personal library.

Indeed, this blog’s current “Month of Partisanship” and
impending “Month of Reform” are mostly the result of me finally getting around
to the reading material thereby acquired, and lumping the books into those two
categories is not only a good way to sort the books but, as a bonus, not a bad
way to sum up the unusual poles that sort-of substituted for good and evil in
her cosmology, for anyone desperate to understand (and stymied by the closing
down of her blog and my desire not to go on about it further): fighting good, Kumbayah harmony bad/lame, nearly the opposite of how
most people see these things.

And, yes, in retrospect, it therefore all had to end in some
sort of big bout – should have,
even.But enough about that, obviously. On to the books, about one per week (and since
– I swear – I prefer harmony to combat, the “Month of Reform” will peak with the Sept. 17, 8pm, Occupy/Tea summit I’m
hosting at Muchmore’s, to resolve the dialectic once and for all and create
peace in our time).

•••

Westbrook
Pegler, who would have been 118 today (and no doubt very world-weary), was a pugnacious mid-century columnist best
known for being anti-communist – and most recently rescued from complete
obscurity by critics shocked at Sarah Palin for quoting him.Given all the stand-up-comedy/Tourette’s-level
invective he hurled against everyone from Stalin to Frank Sinatra to Jews, it’s
dangerous to give him anything like a full endorsement, but, like H.L. Mencken,
he’s at times so brilliant we have to give him some sort of pass or at least
enjoy all the anecdotes he caused.

And like Mencken, he’s usually
right, as made clear by Oliver Pilat’s highly entertaining 1963 biography, Pegler:
Angry Man of the Press.You have
to suspect that much of mid-century politics and letters is best explained by
the existence of ornery drinkers.

But Pegler’s journalistic career really began earlier – at
the 1912 Republican convention, one hundred years ago this summer, as it
happens.As I’ve noted before, that
convention was in some sense the opposite of this month’s impending 2012 GOP
event in Florida, where the one likely chance for excitement is the prospect of
the disappointed Ron Paul fans doing something disruptive (though at this
point, I think they should all be working on the Gary Johnson campaign, unless
Romney’s making Rand Paul his v.p. or something).

By contrast, it was the Progressives who bolted,
disgruntled, in 1912, with Teddy Roosevelt’s forces marching into the
big-government future and leaving behind a hapless (but more libertarian)
President Taft and the Republican Party.It was a time, Pilat says, when “One per cent of the population had more
money than the remaining 99 per cent.”

He got it from his dad, Arthur Pegler, a journalist who was
so aggressive in pursuit of good stories that once when he arrived too late to
cover a riot, he reportedly set off a pile of firecrackers under the window of
the mayor of Rock Island, Illinois so that he could fake a story about an
assassination attempt.We rightly
criticize today’s press, but, well, by comparison...

Arthur would delight his son Westbrook and the rest of the
family with strange, sometimes exaggerated tales from his adventures as a
reporter.He recounted going to look at
a body in a coffin only to have the man wake up and lament that his wife had
repeatedly jumped the gun and attempted to bury him for dead.The non-corpse and Arthur shared a
drink.After Arthur recounted that story
to his children later, his face grew grim and, according to Pilat, he warned
them, “In the name of God, boys, do anything else but don’t be a newspaperman!”

In one case, Arthur may have inadvertently framed a woman
for murder, since he lamented to his photographer that there was no clinching
evidence

that the woman, then on trial as a poisoner and much criticized in the
paper for which Arthur wrote, possessed arsenic, the means by which her husband
died.Arsenic taken from photography
supplies was promptly found in her basement, and Arthur and his colleagues
became so concerned that his photographer had planted the evidence himself that
the newspaper – without admitting culpability – reversed course and led a
crusade to show the woman leniency.Her
sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Pilat notes that Arthur Pegler eventually tired of the
sensationalism he helped create in the Hearst-era press, likening the tone to a
“screaming woman running down the road with her throat cut.”Pilat observes that this metaphor would not
have been sensational enough for use by the Hearst papers “since it failed to
specify whether the woman was disheveled, partially disrobed, or naked.”

•••

Decades later, when son Westbrook Pegler and several other
critics greatly angered President Truman by insulting his daughter’s singing
skills, leading Truman to write a surprisingly intemperate and personal letter
to the editor in her defense, some involved in the conflict released statements
in which they took great pains to smooth things over with the President.Pegler instead read a statement to reporters
that said, “It is a great tragedy in this awful hour that the people of the
U.S. must accept in lieu of leadership the nasty malice of a President whom
Bernard Baruch, in a similar statement, called a rude, uncouth, ignorant man.”

As Pilat relates, from its earliest days, Pegler’s newspaper
column

abounded in exploding
paper-bag phrases like “blood-thirsty bull twirp” for A.A. Berle, Jr., an
Assistant Secretary of State, “China Boy” and “pi-yu” for Henry Luce, the Far
Eastern-oriented publisher, and “little padrone of the Bolsheviki” for Fiorello
H. LaGuardia...Pegler would call Elsa Maxwell “a professional magpie,” and she
would shoot back that he was a “duck-billed platypus”...Or he would dismiss J.
Edgar Hoover as a “night-club fly-cop,” and the FBI chief would reply that his
critic suffered from “mental halitosis.”

Nowadays, you have to be pretty well removed from “respectable”
circles to get away with that – a blogger or Fox commentator, that sort of
thing.Those were the days.

Pegler would careen through numerous such feuds over the
decades, with excursions into Cold War political philosophizing and brief bouts
of conspiracy theory, delighting even those readers who disagreed with him,
simply because they were eager to see what boxing-like conflict he would stir
up next.His rhetorical flights of fancy
veered into outright libel at times – although, somewhat like Ann Coulter today, it
was all muddied by the ambiguity about when he was serious and when he was deploying a joking metaphor, possibly one that implied his target was a
criminal or even descended from a long line of criminals or mental
defectives.(He was a bit like a working
man’s Gore Vidal in this way, you might say.)

If there is life and spirit left in us, we have to hope this
level of fun can be recaptured without sacrificing the facts.Yet I try to be nice.

(In other historically-pugnacious news, I see that on
Tuesday night next week, a group called the Society for the Advancement of
Social Studies – SASS – is throwing a party/talks on the theme of “Historical Badasses,”
including Genghis Khan and the Vikings.I may have to attend, as long as I’m out of there in time to see
present-day badasses Jezzy and the Belles perform at Bowery Electric at 9:45.)